Last week the Church of England rolled out its big guns, in the form of the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, and trained both barrels on the perceived culprits behind the current world financial crisis in a ‘good cop-bad cop’ duo where the ‘bad’ cop (Canterbury) is so good that the ‘good’ cop (York) is forced to be positively obsequious. Eloquent testimony to the mollifying powers of the English shires when even the plain speaking man from Uganda chose to address the gathered fraternity of international bankers in terms more suited to a Harrogate tea parlour than the fire and brimstone which their unbridled consumption of usury truly deserves. As he approaches the end of his speech one soon realises that the whole thing has been a genteel preamble to a request for a share in the proceeds of what his colleague (Canterbury) rightly describes in the Spectator as, “…that almost unimaginable wealth [which] has been generated by equally unimaginable levels of fiction, paper transactions with no concrete outcome beyond profit for traders.” Our bad cop should perhaps take note that these transactions rarely involve anything quite so tangible as paper!

Enter now our ‘rookie’ cop, Norwich (Mosque rather than Cathedral). By limiting himself to citing the Jewish and Christian scriptures Canterbury is continuing to display the centuries old ‘systemic denial’, turning a deaf ear to the clearest and most fearless voice of all, that of the Muslims who constantly marvel at the refusal of their world-weary ‘senior’ colleagues to bring the accused seriously to book. However, as frustrating as this may be, the basic reason for it is very clear to us.

What else could we expect from an ecclesiastical organisation that rubber stamped the origins of modern finance at the very birth of the modern age and is thus complicit in its actions? What else could we expect when Christianity has abandoned the very concept that God might have anything to say about law, relegating that to the preserve of Judaism which it regards as an ancient ‘law religion’?

As we have stood in prayer in the Norwich Mosque night after night throughout this recently ended month of Ramadan, listening to the entire Qur’an recited by heart by a young English Imam, we are reminded with a sense of infinite gratitude that we have immediate and constant access to something which our older colleagues do not and which they fail to recognise – the Qur’an. The Qur’an is the most recent in the series of monotheistic revelations, the last word in revealed guidance and warning against every form of idolatry; a later ‘law religion’ that was intended exclusively for this final phase in the story of mankind’s struggle to conduct our life’s affairs in the way that is best for us in this world and the next.

Therefore, returning to the case of the international bankers in particular and capitalism in general, it is well known in the Muslim world and increasingly so beyond it, that the Norwich ‘rookies’ have been shouting the charges from the rooftops for the past twenty years. We have pointed to the Emperor’s obvious nakedness, we have described the ugly bits, taken his measurements and offered him a set of decent clothing. Until now he has preferred to listen to the flattery of his friends in Church and State but the chill on Wall Street is getting very uncomfortable. So now, putting all humour aside, we’ll try again.

Our question to Archbishops Canterbury and York is: What happened to the religion of the man who threw the moneychangers out of the temple? Or even more appositely, what happened to the monotheistic religion that said no to idolatry? How has it countenanced the open idolatry of money and greed that defines this age?

We conclude that Christianity’s dilemma is its desire to do the right thing even though it is no longer sure what that is. But this lack of clarity has come about through its forsaking the revealed law, leaving to Caesar what is Caesar’s only for it to be inherited by the bankers who very clearly craft the law to their own ends by making use of whichever ‘Caesar’ happens to be ushered their way, be it Bush or Brown, Obama or McCain – or by simply taking care of things directly – after all, did Mr Paulson not come straight to the US Treasury from Goldman Sachs investment bank? Christianity is left expostulating on the sidelines, as in the case of our bad cop, or reduced to sycophancy as in the case of our good cop: “Let us help the moneychangers set out their stalls in the temple and perhaps they might be kind enough to give us a little for the temple’s upkeep and for a few good works.”

It is this impossible situation that necessitated the revelation of the Qur’ān and the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, which alone among the revealed religions has an utterly clear articulation of what is not permitted in commercial practice, e.g. usury, hoarding and undercutting. Nowadays the Islamic prohibition of usury is known even to averagely educated non-Muslims. It also articulates a completely coherent set of profitable and permissible commercial practices, including modes of partnership, profit-sharing, crop-sharing etc. effective enough to sustain a vigorous global civilisation for more than a millennium until foolish greed and naivety made Muslims easy prey to the blandishments of duplicitous men with chequebooks and the offer of insane amounts of wealth such as can only be made when the the means are no longer natural.

However, to the modern ear a word such as ‘usury’ rings uneasily. We think of Shylock and anti-semitism, and if we go to the dictionary for guidance we only find it defined as ‘exorbitant or excessive interest on a loan’, that is unless we look it up in an etymological dictionary where we find that it is ‘any interest on a loan’. The modern definition is of course, problematic, since what is exorbitant is very much a matter of fashion, it having been settled in Calvin’s time as anything over 4% whereas today almost anything goes.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the authentic relationship of Islam to the religions that preceded it than this matter of commerce where it can clearly be seen that Islam is the confirmation of what was true in the previous revelations. The historically minded person, a dying breed, will discover that proscriptions identical to those of Islam against various business practices that have become common today, were also offences under common law which were simply obliterated in the rise of the current commercial order such as:

ENGROSSING: buying up all of a commodity in order to control prices; monopoly. This is the very foundation of hypermarket and supermarket chains. The fact that a variety of organisations monopolise trade rather than a single body is no great solace for us who are squeezed by their depradations.

FORESTALLING: the act of going out to meet traders before they have brought their goods to the market. Another fundamental basis of supermarkets, who by the simple expedient of exclusive ownership of the market to which the traders are bringing their goods, no longer need to forestall the traders.

UNDERCUTTING: deliberately selling goods at cheaper prices than their competitors in order to take trade away from them and kill all competition. This is a form of barbarism which does not admit of a world in which everyone should be allowed to eat.

USURY: literally ‘increase’; in general, any unjustified increase accruing to one party to a sale when stipulated as part of the deal, interest payments being one very obvious example.

This definition of usury has simply been left in the dust by the speed with which modern finance has devised means and ways of getting something out of nothing or getting more than it lent, for no effort, when the sum lent was merely digits entered in a computer terminal in the first place. They have gone to such extremes that the instruments of modern finance are simply not understandable even by advanced economists and bankers with long experience of their trade and are almost entirely in the hands of advanced computer programmers and mathematical theoreticians. This has resulted in the classic bubble phenomena and resultant collapses, recessions and depressions (not to mention the unavoidable inflation) that have dogged usury-capitalism since its birth, growing in exponential terms to such an extent that people are asking not whether there is going to be a recession but rather, whether it is going to be the final inevitable ‘crash’?

Some of the fundamental axioms on which the pseudo-science of economics is raised include imposingly named concepts such as ‘the law of supply of demand’ which creates the impression that it is comparable to something like the law of gravity. This is one of their axiomatic (i.e. cast iron) truths that need no further proof. But the law of supply and demand is far from axiomatic, indeed many societies for great swathes of their history have not relied on it at all. Merchants, farmers, pastoralists and craftsmen knew the prices of raw materials, labour and any other costs and set their prices for finished goods or produce within well known limits whereby the usual level of sales would enable them to live reasonably well. The idea that you should charge a great deal for something because it is in demand leads to the logical conclusion that when there is famine you can charge a fortune for food, which is completely indecent.
The current situation represents the logical extremity of this indecency. People who have grown obscenely wealthy through derivatives trading and managing hedge funds, (which are themselves many multiples of the monetary value of the world’s total GDP according to this new science fiction view of economics) constantly seek out profitable uses to which they can put their intangible and illusory money, and so they buy, sell and speculate amongst themselves on commodities: gold, oil and now food, and thus we experience the rise in prices.

Supply and demand is not a ‘law’ but a strategic abuse of the market. Things have their values, and profits have their natural limits. This spurious ‘law’ is just one example of economics as a pseudo-science erected in order to justify theft. For middle class Westerners this is bad enough even if merely somewhat constricting, but for the impoverished wherever they are in the world, it is a matter of life or death.

It is clear from the above that the current crisis is simply the tip of an iceberg, whose causes are an enormous number of unacceptable inequitable  theories and practices that are not only in themselves manifestations of an extreme greed that has burgeoned beyond all sane limits, but are arguably the very motor that is driving the destruction of the biosphere and is the machine behind the murder of upwards of a million Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghanis in the ongoing fallaciously named ‘war on terror’, better described as a ‘war of terror’ which only the incorrigibly naïve believe to be waged for democratising the Middle East.

Now, our remaining options are few. We could ‘tut-tut’ on the sidelines like Canterbury and York knowing full well that we will be tolerated just as long as we do not seriously seek to impinge on the exercise of power in any substantial way. That would then be an endorsement of the entire enterprise, like the court jester who alone was permitted to mock the king as a way of disarming baronial ambitions. A safety valve.

We could campaign to bring this insanity to an end. However, this would be a duplication of effort, since, as we currently see, financiers and bankers are doing a very good job of bringing their own enterprises to an end, although they might bring down the last remnants of civilisation along with them. For the same reason, we see no particular virtue in taking up the armed struggle, they have already beaten everyone else to the option of violence. As for the ballot box, we need only look to the ‘Caesars’ we mentioned earlier to know what to expect from the vote. The very proposition that one is exercising a meaningful choice when presented with sets of candidates whose views of existence and whose actual policies are indistinguishable is laughable.

No, safety and security belongs to the people who embrace sanity, and that will comprise trading not with figments of the imagination but with real products and commodities and acceptable modes of transacting with them. But the madness that springs from assigning numbers to abstractions via shadowy mechanisms in the belief that this confers value must be seen for what it is.

Those who wish to embrace sanity will have to relearn what a just transaction is because it is no longer obvious – and they will have to make strenuous efforts to learn what an unjust one is, because as we have seen, opening the door to injustice, opens the door to greed, and opening the door to greed opens the door to idolatry and opening the door to idolatry opens the door to madness.

Many of the key elements that are sane and lead to sanity once formed a part of Europe’s heritage, which she has by-and-large abandoned, but they are there in the last revelation from the Divine, the Qur’ān and the concomitant practice of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and the first generations of Islam, which endorses whatever was genuine in the previous revelations and whatever is wholesome in human affairs. These two aspects are coming together again in the large number of Westerners and Europeans who are embracing Islam earnestly looking for a way forward for humanity in a dark age.

However, when all is said and done, what remains abundantly clear is that neither church, nor synagogue nor state possess either the will, the method or the daring to face the consequences of embracing sanity because amongst other initially unpleasant things, that would mean embracing the fresh wisdom of the ‘rookies’ as well as acknowledging the source of that wisdom – the Qur’an and the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.

Hajj Uthman Morrison and Hajj Abdassamad Clarke

References 1 The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism. The Spectator. Wednesday, 24th September 2008. http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/2172131/face-it-marx-was-partly-right-about-capitalism.thtml 2 The Archbishop of York speaks to The Worshipful Company of International Bankers Dinner at Drapers’ Hall London. Wednesday, 24th September 2008. http://www.archbishopofyork.org/1980